Exploring openSUSE's automated testing tool for ISO images
Bakers and burners
© Lead Image © Markus Feilner, CC-BY-SA 4.0
Quality Assurance is "like a baker testing his recipe for a cake by trying it once it is out of the oven," says Bernhard Wiedemann, inventor of openQA. OpenSUSE's openQA project is a powerful tool for testing Linux distributions – and even Android images.
Life's too short for manual testing, says the website for openQA [1] (Figure 1), and most software developers will agree. Many developers feel like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, working in a factory, repeating the very same steps over and over again.
Most available server software, especially when it is offering APIs, can be tested by specially written clients that perform the very same tasks over and over again, counting success or failure. But what about desktop software, and what about distributions?
Some years ago, the openSUSE project suffered from a severe lack of testing and human testers. Nobody wanted to do the tedious clicking-watching-comparing job. But somebody had to do it, and they did it fairly well, it seems, at least if you look at the success that SUSE and openSUSE have had in recent years. However, the developers saw much room and need for improvement, and, as QA experts often warn, "human QA does not scale."
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